Single-Atom Manipulation And The Chemistry Of Mechanosynthesis Slidecast At nanoscienceworks.org

Direct link to the Slidecast is available HERE. Local copy of Slidecast content is available HERE.

I am pleased to report that an abridged version of the talk I gave at the SME Nanosystem Roadmap Conference (containing one set of tooltip work being performed in collaboration with Eric Drexler and a second in collaboration with Robert Freitas and Ralph Merkle) is now available as a slidecast at nanoscienceworks.org. By way of introduction, I posted about nanoscienceworks.org previously when the 2nd Edition of the CRC Handbook of Nanoscience, Engineering, and Technology was published, as the nanoscienceworks site is managed by the handbook publisher, Taylor and Francis. Nanoscienceworks.org is an information-rich place for nano-researchers (where a biography of your truly is located), publications, and nano-related news aggregated from various sources. Slidecasts are steered PowerPoint presentations with associated audio, all in Flash format for universal playability (I think they're more generally referred to as screencasts, but they may be new enough that you can call your own label). Unlike a typical research talk, you have time to meditate on verbal content before committing to mp3 format, quite handy when you tend to fly through concepts or find yourself inundated with new research ideas as you walk through the slides and then find yourself jotting notes and leaving long quiet spells in the audio. And if the possibilities of Slidecasts tickle your fancy and you want a thorough range of examples to steal, er, borrow presentation ideas from, I recommend heading over to Bioscreencast.com, whose "About Us" is cohabitated by none other than the good Dr. Deepak Singh.

NSWorks

Click on the image to go to the Slidecast page.

From the website:

One revolutionary, and controversial, prediction of early nanotechnology research was the mechanical manipulation of atomic and molecular feedstocks, or mechanosynthesis. With laboratories now demonstrating atomic manipulation within covalent frameworks, computational chemistry is being employed for its predictive power in proposing and analyzing organic molecular frameworks capable of single-atom control and transfer. This slidecast on single atom manipulation and the chemistry of mechanosynthesis is presented by Dr. Damian Allis, Syracuse University and Nanorex Inc.

If, by some chance, you want to link to the Slidecast, please do so directly from the nanoscienceworks.org site and not primarily from here. I would not have produced it without their request and, like any all-encompassing nano-related website, viewers will likely find their site far more useful and educational than this one.

In the interest of time and space, I did reduce the size of the Slidecast presentation, leaving out a few slides that added some useful background but were not necessary to the overall scope of the talk. Just for the official record, I've included three additional slides and associated text from the original talk in the non-audio copy of the Slidecast sitting in somewhereville. To the content in the slidecast one might find useful additional information in Chris Pheonix's CRNano Live Blog of my talk.

Questions or critique, I'd be very interested in any comments anyone has. The field gets pushed forward with discussion and debate, so the more feedback the better (either as comments below or in emails which, if interested, I'll then post).

…and if it were not enough to have his mechanosynthesis-affiliated self in the slidecast category, Robert Freitas received double billing for December with "Australia-U.S. Team Designs Test Bed for 3-D Nanorobots," a post reporting his upcoming (January 2008) article in the journal Nanotechnology.

www.sme.org
www.sme.org/nanosystems
www.e-drexler.com
www.rfreitas.com
www.merkle.com
nanoscienceworks.org/slidecast
nanoscienceworks.org
www.somewhereville.com/?p=80
search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbninquiry.asp?r=1&ean=9780849375637
www.taylorandfrancis.com
nanoscienceworks.org/people/content/allis-damian-gregory
office.microsoft.com/en-us/powerpoint/default.aspx
www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screencast
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mp3
www.bioscreencast.com
mndoci.com/blog
nanoscienceworks.org/slidecast/single-atom-manipulation-and-chemistry-of-mechanosynthesis
www.somewhereville.com/?page_id=99
www.somewhereville.com
www.xenophilia.org
www.crnano.org
crnano.typepad.com/crnblog/2007/10/single-atom-man.html
nanoscienceworks.org/articles/australia-u-s-team-design-test-bed-for-3-d-nanorobots
www.iop.org/EJ/toc/0957-4484/19/1

Official Release Of The Technology Roadmap For Productive Nanosystems

TRPN

After two years of development, the Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems (TRPN) is now available for download. Much of what I had to say about the utility of the TRPN that might be of any interest or relevance found its way into the Guest Essay I wrote for the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology. One of the points I made mention of in nearly all individual discussions about the TRPN was the rapidity with which very new research areas (and researchers) were presented that, having not been represented at the first meeting, became integral to the tone and content of the final document. The significant expansion of the Working Group membership over the two years of development was another example of the rapid growth in research areas relevant to atomically precise manufacturing, and I take it as both motivating and surely non-trivial the extent to which the National Laboratories and affiliated researchers contributed content to a document that not only sees beyond the states of the various nanoscale disciplines, but begins to approach, in expectation, the foundational aspects of atomic and molecular control that marked the conceptual beginning of this field we now call nanotechnology.

From www.e-drexler.com:

Developments in the last 12 months show that the Roadmap is quite timely: As part of a study released last December, the U.S. National Research Council reviewed the technical analysis that I presented in Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation and called for experimental research in support of molecular manufacturing. Subsequently, DARPA issued a request for proposals for developing tip-based nanofabrication at the threshold of atomic precision, and the U.K. government announced grants to research teams developing nanomachines that can build materials molecule by molecule.

The Roadmap (2.4 MB) and Working Group Proceedings (14.5 MB) are, at this moment, available for immediate download from www.e-drexler.com, with other locations soon to follow. In addition to what I wrote in the CRN Essay, Paul Burrows from PNNL wrote a guest essay available at smalltimes.com, and the SME TRPN Launch in Arlington, VA this past October was blogged in great detail by Chris Phoenix at CRN.

www.foresight.org/roadmaps/index.html
www.crnano.org/archive07.htm#58Essay
www.somewhereville.com/?p=91
www.crnano.org
www.foresight.org/roadmaps/working_group.html
www.energy.gov/organization/labs-techcenters.htm
www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11752
www.e-drexler.com/d/06/00/Nanosystems/toc.html
www.darpa.mil/mto/solicitations/baa07-59/index.html
www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2007/October/19100701.asp#
e-drexler.com/p/07/00/1204TechnologyRoadmap.html
emslbios.pnl.gov/id/burrows_pe
www.pnl.gov
www.smalltimes.com/…/Roadmap-for-Productive-Nanosystems-rolled-out-at-two-day-workshop/
www.sme.org
www.sme.org/nanosystems
www.arlingtonva.us
crnano.typepad.com/crnblog/2007/10/roadmap-confere.html
www.xenophilia.org